A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [9]
The question still hangs heavy in the air: If our behavior is not making us happy, why do we act this way?
The zoologist and philosopher Neil Evernden tells the familiar story of how we silence the world. During the nineteenth cen tury, many vivisectionists routinely severed the vocal cords be fore operating on an animal. This meant that during the experiment the animals could not scream (referred to in the lit erature as emitting "high-pitched vocalization"). By cutting the vocal cords experimenters simultaneously denied reality—by pre tending a silent animal feels no pain—and they affirmed it by implicitly acknowledging that the animal's cries would have told them what they already knew, that the creature was a sentient, feeling (and, during the vivisection, tortured) being.
As Evernden comments, "The rite of passage into the scien tific," or, I would add, modern, "way of being centres on the ability to apply the knife to the vocal cords, not just of the dog on the table, but of life itself. Inwardly, he [the modern human being] must be able to sever the cords of his own consciousness. Outwardly, the effect must be the destruction of the larynx of the biosphere, an action essential to the transformation of the world into a material object." This is no less true for our relations with fellow humans.
If we are to survive, we must learn a new way to live, or re- learn an old way. There have existed, and for the time being still exist, many cultures whose members refuse to cut the vocal cords of the planet, and refuse to enter into the deadening deal which we daily accept as part of living. It is perhaps significant that prior to contact with Western Civilization many of these cultures did not have rape, nor did they have child abuse (the Okanagans of what is now British Columbia, to provide just one example, had neither word nor concept in their language corre sponding to the abuse of a child. They did have a word corre sponding to the violation of a woman: literally translated it means "someone looked at me in a way I don't like"). It is perhaps sig nificant as well that these cultures did not drive the passenger pigeon to extinction, nor the salmon, the wood bison, the sea mink, the Labrador heath hen, the Eskimo curlew, the Taipei tree frog. Would that we could say the same. It is perhaps signifi cant that members of these cultures listen attentively (as though their lives depend on it, which of course they do) to what plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and stars have to say, and that these cul tures have been able to do what we can only dream of, which is to live in dynamic equilibrium with the rest of the world.
The task ahead of us is awesome, to meet human needs without imperiling life on the planet.
Coyotes, Kittens,
and Conversations
"We are the land....... That is the fundamental idea of Native American life: the land and the people are the same." Paula Gunn Allen
Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.” Aristotle
MY CONVERSATION WITH COYOTES began, so far as I could tell, on a cold day in 1994. Several times over the previous months, coyotes had come out of the small patch of rocky forest to the east of my home and caught chickens, then taken them away to eat. Once in a while I saw a coyote dash out, or heard a squawk, then turned to see a quick glimpse of gray that simply disappeared when my two dogs tried to run it down. A few times the dogs did catch up to the coyote, and I saw a flurry of fur and dust, followed by the dogs running home to sit quietly, chastened, for a day or two in the barn. Twice I saw one coyote make an abortive rush at the chickens, and when the dogs gave chase, another coyote trotted from the other direction to pick up a bird before I, the dogs, or the poultry—all distracted—could react. But most often I merely